


How do we do this, when she was our glue?

by nevermindirah



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-10
Updated: 2019-12-10
Packaged: 2021-02-24 16:22:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21740890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nevermindirah/pseuds/nevermindirah
Summary: Would Nat have wanted a headstone? A tree planted in her honor? There was no body to bury, as much as Steve had tried on Morag. In the end they decided to picnic on the same patch of grass where four of the five Bartons had turned to dust on that awful day, because it was Natasha's sacrifice that had brought them home.
Relationships: Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov, Natasha Romanov & Sam Wilson, Nebula & Natasha Romanov, Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov
Kudos: 26





	How do we do this, when she was our glue?

**Author's Note:**

> I've needed to write this since about 10 minutes after I saw Endgame, and finally yesterday, half a year later, I read the script, had really weird dreams, and wrote the whole damn thing on physical paper like I haven't done with a fic in years. Natasha Romanoff had a funeral, we just didn't see it because #misogyny-in-hollywood. And also because she wouldn't have wanted a big flashy funeral. Natasha built a quiet but stunning life that would have overwhelmed her to see like this, but she died, so here we are.
> 
> I hope you haven't experienced grief like this in your real life, but if you have, I'm right there with you. Death is bullshit. The sharp knife of a short life indeed.

This was always how it was going to end. A quiet wake, no engraved invitations, no press releases. Just a huddle of the few who really knew her.

Of course, if the people behind those awful Batman movies optioned any of the biographies that misogynists had written about her after Insight, she probably wouldn't get a funeral in a movie about her own damn life. Hard to get a closeup of jiggling through the boob window costume when the character's dead.

But Natasha is finally -- finally -- at peace now. She doesn't need to deploy snark for self-defense anymore.

If she were here, she'd be too busy laughing her face off at Old Man Rogers, whose wrinkles finally matched his cranky grandpa soul. The khakis finally made sense.

Laura and Clint hosted. It took Clint a month at home and then a week on a rescue mission with Thor and Rocket before he could verbalize his grief, but he got there, and now everyone who loved Natasha and was still around to say goodbye was on their way to the farm.

Nick Fury pulled up in a Winnebago and proceeded to set up an Army tent the size of half a football field with a 36-year-old Monica Rambeau.

Old Man Rogers took his motorcycle because Sam Wilson, who would always love him but stopped sleeping with him sometime after they left Bucky in Wakanda, now had a younger supersoldier boyfriend to make fun of for his road trip radio choices.

Okoye had needed to stay close to home, but Rhodey and Nebula had visited her in Wakanda before coming to the farm and had a kimoyo bead full of video of their drunken storytelling about Nat.

Nat. She had been the glue, the one keeping all these high-tech, higher-purpose, extra-as-hell people on mission and in communication with each other for umpteen years now, the five years of crisis and otherwise. How the hell do you coordinate with each other to say goodbye to the one person who you could always rely on to keep each other connected. How.

Pepper left Morgan with Happy for the weekend and got in a quinjet with Maria, Sharon, and Melinda. The ride was quiet, easily so at first and then slowly growing painful, until Melinda said fuck it and decided to ask Pepper for parenting advice. See, in an alternate timeline she was about to become an adoptive mother to an Inhuman who could draw the future, and if none of them could handle talking about their grief then they might as well talk about something both absurd and useful.

It did the trick until Maria chimed in about something Auntie Nat had said to Lila as a toddler, and they all fell silent until Sharon had said fuck it, started full-on crying, and began to give a dramatic reading of her text history with Nat as filtered through the SHIELD data dump.

Bruce had gone on the most recent Asgardians of the Galaxy mission with Clint and the team, and he'd stayed on the Benatar until it was farm time. Watching Quill obsess over a woman who didn't know him at all in her own timeline put his own possessive bullshit in Toxic Masculinity 101 perspective. And also, space! Natasha had fucking loved space.

Somewhere in Indiana, a deceptively young-looking woman who Natasha had once known as Yelena chose not to drive to Iowa and crash a party she wasn't supposed to know about.

Wanda and Cooper were cooking up a storm as more and more of the people who'd loved Natasha made their way onto the Bartons' property. Laura was in high demand with so many livestock un-blipped and five years behind on their veterinary care, which was just as well, because the horses and pigs didn't mind the occasional bouts of sobbing, and Laura didn't want to hide her grief from her children but she didn't want to fall apart in front of them either. Choosing the optimal time to feel an emotion was one of the many things Nat had taught her over the years.

Here they all were, the Avengers, assembled. Time to cry.

Would Nat have wanted a headstone? A tree planted in her honor? There was no body to bury, as much as Steve had tried on Morag. In the end they decided to picnic on the same patch of grass where four of the five Bartons had turned to dust on that awful day, because it was Natasha's sacrifice that had brought them home.

Laura, Cooper, Lila, and Nate. Sam and Bucky. Nick and Maria Hill. T'challa, via kimoyo bead. Sharon. Maria Rambeau. Wanda. They were all here because Nat wasn't.

Those who'd survived the five-year grind _with_ Nat and those who'd survived _because of_ her enjoyed a feast of barbecued meats from at least three different planets and as many side dishes as anyone could think of stories to tell about Nat in connection to.

Nate went with fudgsicles because his namesake had taught him to be strategic, which is exactly what he'd told the gathered mourners.

Steve made an honest-to-God Jell-o mold. He owned up to having voluntarily chosen to live through the American 1950s, and he imagined what Nat might have had to say about that, but also, this particular Jell-o mold was his oldest daughter's favorite. In an alternate timeline, Natasha Sarah Carter Rogers was, at age 74, still appearing in the occasional film in between her duties as UN ambassador advocating for children across the globe.

Bucky made matzo ball soup, because apparently it was a joke between them that while it was statistically not the most likely that Ivan and the nameless mother the Red Room had stolen her from had been Jewish, the two of them celebrating Passover together was one of the more fun fuck-yous to their respective Soviet handlers either of them could think of.

Maria Hill couldn't get any words out about the grocery store angel food cake that she'd brought, but Sharon assured them that in five more years they'd get the story and that it'd be hilarious.

Rhodey brought a box of meatloaf MREs that everyone grudgingly agreed tasted acceptable with extra ketchup. Everyone except Carol, who'd refused to get in on Sam and Rhodey's Air Force high five and instead pulled off an Iron Man shape from a peach Fruit Roll-Up to hand to Lila.

Clint waited until well after his children had gone to bed and even Thor and Steve were tipsy to tell the raunchiest, bloodiest, most embarrassing, most romantic story a person could possibly imagine about a can of Spaghetti-Os.

Nobody expected Pepper to speak, and she didn't, not at first. But when Nebula tore open a fresh bag of Pirate's Booty and rained it all down on her and Rhodey, Pepper laughed so hard she couldn't stop herself from telling the story.

Sam wasn't on duty as Captain America that night, but over the course of the afternoon and late into the night he made four separate speeches about Natasha Romanoff. She who'd scooped him out of the sky after jumping out a 41st-floor window, who'd been his de facto peer counselor after his time in superhero supermax, who'd picked him up from Wakanda after helping convince him Steve wasn't right for him anymore -- but this is Natasha's story, not his. The year before Thanos, Nat had managed to smuggle Sam into the US for Thanksgiving, and he'd brought her along to his parents' place in the DC suburbs. Her scalloped potatoes and beets dish had been a hit as she'd expected, but Sam's family had loved her, and that was a feeling she still didn't know quite how to handle.

And she never quite would. Natasha Romanoff, daughter of Ivan, origins otherwise lost to history, died on a lonely planet because her best friend in the world -- in the universe, it turns out -- failed to jump first. No fanfare, no Oscar-winning death scene. Just like that. Gone.

But she had family. Every single one of these people loved her. Little though she might have imagined it, every single one of these people knew her. And after a lifetime of holding everyone else's expectations, everyone else's needs before her own, finally, she could rest.


End file.
